Read this before anything else
This is not legal advice and we are not lawyers. What is below is a set of dates and the article numbers they sit under, taken from one reading of one published European regulation on one named day, so you can go to the official text yourself and check every line of it.
The rules on this page are not in force today. They start applying on 2027-01-20, which is 143 days from the day this page was built. Nothing you are shipping today is breaking them and we are not going to tell you otherwise. This is about being ready, not about a verdict on today.
We do not reprint the regulation's own words anywhere on this page, and that is deliberate. We hold them — our reading quotes the text sentence by sentence, which is how we prove we read it instead of remembering it — but we have no readable permission to republish that text, and no permission is not the same as permission. So you get the dates, the article numbers and our own plain description, and a link to read the official text yourself. The page you are reading is checked against our own quotes on every build: 20 of them, and if one of them ever turns up in these words the page does not get built at all.
There is no file behind this page and there is not going to be one: the whole of what we hold is printed on this page. One thing is held back and it is named rather than hidden: 1 of the 11 declaration boxes below has wording the regulation itself lays down, so we print the box and not the words. That is the licence limit above doing its job, not a sample being kept from you.
The 4 datesconsolidated version 02023R1230-20230629, including corrigendum C1 · read 2026-08-24
Every one of these is a calendar date in the published text, and the article it sits under is in the last column. We are not printing the sentence — go and read it at the address at the bottom of this page.
| What happens | Date | Article | How sure we are |
|---|---|---|---|
| the date the new rules start applying | 2027-01-20 | Article 54 | verified |
| the day the old machinery directive stops | 2027-01-20 | Article 51(2) | verified |
| machines PLACED on the market before that date can still be sold on afterwards | 2027-01-20 | Article 52(1) | verified |
| the date each country had to tell Brussels what its penalties are | 2026-10-20 | Article 50(2) | verified |
The date that matters is the day a machine is PLACED on the market, not the day it was built and not the day it was sold on. A machine placed on the market before that date under the old rules can still be made available afterwards. That is the difference between having a deadline and not having one, and it is why anybody telling you everything you have already built is about to become illegal is wrong.
2 periods, which are not dates
These two are lengths of time, not days in a calendar. They are kept out of the table above because a length of time printed in a column headed “date” is how a page comes to promise a deadline that does not exist.
| What it limits | How long | Article | How sure we are |
|---|---|---|---|
| how long the maker has to post a paper copy if a buyer asks for one | 30 days | Article 10(7) | verified |
| how long a digital declaration has to stay online | 10 years | Article 10(8) | verified |
The 12 things we read and can point at12 items · 1 withdrawn · 1 unverified
Each line below is our own description of something the text says, next to the article it sits under. Every one of them is marked “verified”, which here means one thing and one thing only: the sentence we quoted in our own file was found word for word in the published text, and the article number beside it is the article it sits under. It does not mean a lawyer has advised on it.
| What it says, in our words | Article | How sure we are |
|---|---|---|
| the instructions, the safety information and the Annex III information must be in a language the users can easily understand, and which country decides that is the country you are selling into | Article 10(7), fifth subparagraph | verified |
| the written warnings ON the machine have to be in that language too, not just the book | Annex III, 1.7.1 | verified |
| the instructions are allowed to be digital, on three conditions | Article 10(7), points (a) to (c) | verified |
| if the buyer asks AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE, you must post them a paper copy free, within a month | Article 10(7), third subparagraph | verified |
| if a non-professional could end up using the machine, the essential safety information goes on paper whatever else is digital | Article 10(7), fourth subparagraph | verified |
| maintenance instructions meant for your own trained engineers may be in ONE EU language only - this is the carve-out that saves real money | Annex III, 1.7.4, second sentence | verified |
| the declaration of conformity has to be translated into the language the destination country requires, and kept up to date | Article 21(2) | verified |
| the declaration has a set list of things it must contain | Annex V, Part A | verified |
| the declaration is the manufacturer's own statement, made under the manufacturer's sole responsibility - a translation supplier cannot sign it | Annex V, Part A, point 4, and Article 21(4) | verified |
| your European importer is separately on the hook for the instructions being there | Article 13(4) | verified |
| your European distributor has to CHECK the language before putting it on a shelf - this is why somebody else is chasing you about it | Article 15(2)(c) | verified |
| the old 'Original instructions' / 'Translation of the original instructions' labelling does not appear anywhere in the new text | whole text, searched | verified |
1 thing we went looking for and could not find, and 1 we have not checked
These are left here, named, rather than quietly dropped. A list that only ever grows is a list nobody re-read.
- every language version counts equally in lawWithdrawn. We went looking for this and the published text does not say it. What the text actually does is drop the old original-versus-translation labelling, which is a different statement and is recorded separately. Telling a customer 'all versions have equal legal weight' would be us stating a legal conclusion we cannot point at a sentence for.
- which exact word is correct for DANGER / WARNING / CAUTION / NOTICE in each languageUnverified. These come from a safety-sign standard we have not read, not from this Regulation. So the checker only requires that A signal word survives translation. It does not assert which word is right.
The withdrawn one is worth reading twice, because the opposite of it is what everybody selling this says. You will be told that under the new rules every language version of your manual carries the same legal weight. We went looking for that sentence and the published text does not contain it. What the text does do is drop the old original-versus-translation labelling, which is a different statement, and it is on the list above under its own article. We are not going to hand you a legal conclusion we cannot point at a sentence for.
Which language: 31 countries, 27 languagesreference data, not law · 31 countries
This table is reference data and not the legal test. The text says the language is the one the users can easily understand, as determined by the country you are selling into. It does not print a country-to-language table anywhere. What is below is the official languages of each country, which anybody can look up, and we use it to suggest a language — never to tell you that you are non-compliant without it.
| Country | Official languages | Can we fact-check that version? |
|---|---|---|
| Austria | German | yes: German |
| Belgium | Dutch, French, German | yes: Dutch, yes: French, yes: German |
| Bulgaria | Bulgarian | no: Bulgarian |
| Switzerland | German, French, Italian | yes: German, yes: French, yes: Italian |
| Cyprus | Greek | no: Greek |
| Czechia | Czech | yes: Czech |
| Germany | German | yes: German |
| Denmark | Danish | yes: Danish |
| Estonia | Estonian | no: Estonian |
| Spain | Spanish | yes: Spanish |
| Finland | Finnish, Swedish | yes: Finnish, yes: Swedish |
| France | French | yes: French |
| Greece | Greek | no: Greek |
| Croatia | Croatian | no: Croatian |
| Hungary | Hungarian | yes: Hungarian |
| Ireland | English, Irish | yes: English, no: Irish |
| Iceland | Icelandic | no: Icelandic |
| Italy | Italian | yes: Italian |
| Liechtenstein | German | yes: German |
| Lithuania | Lithuanian | no: Lithuanian |
| Luxembourg | French, German, Luxembourgish | yes: French, yes: German, no: Luxembourgish |
| Latvia | Latvian | no: Latvian |
| Malta | Maltese, English | no: Maltese, yes: English |
| Netherlands | Dutch | yes: Dutch |
| Norway | Norwegian | no: Norwegian |
| Poland | Polish | yes: Polish |
| Portugal | Portuguese | yes: Portuguese |
| Romania | Romanian | yes: Romanian |
| Sweden | Swedish | yes: Swedish |
| Slovenia | Slovenian | no: Slovenian |
| Slovakia | Slovak | no: Slovak |
We can fact-check 14 of those 27 languages and we cannot fact-check the other 13. The 13 we cannot are Bulgarian, Greek, Estonian, Irish, Croatian, Icelandic, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Norwegian, Slovak, Slovenian. We hold no safety-heading words and no “do not” words for those, so we could produce a version and we could not prove its numbers and its warnings survived. We will not sell one of those as checked. Counted off the checker's own two word lists as this page was built.
The declaration: 11 boxes, and we do not sign it
The conformity declaration that goes with the machine has a fixed layout. Here are the boxes, in the order the text lists them, described in our own words wherever the wording is ours to choose.
| Box | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| 1. The machine | Product, type, model, batch or serial number. If it has been substantially modified, say so |
| 2. Manufacturer | Name and address - and the authorised representative's, where there is one |
| 3. Place of assembly | Only for lifting machinery that is permanently installed in a building and can only be put together on site |
| 4. Statement | Fixed wording, set by the regulation itself — we do not reprint it, see the article |
| 5. Object of the declaration | Enough to identify the machine and trace it. A clear colour photograph is allowed here |
| 6. What it is being declared against | The Union legislation the machine conforms to |
| 7. Standards applied | The harmonised standards or common specifications used, with the dates their references were published. If only parts were applied, say which parts |
| 8. Independent body, where one was used | Its name and number, what it did, and the certificate reference |
| 9. Internal production control, where that route was used | — |
| 10. Additional information | — |
| Signed for and on behalf of | Place and date of issue, then name, function and signature |
1 of those 11 boxes has to carry a fixed sentence written into the regulation, so what goes in it is not ours to put in our own words and not ours to reprint. The box is named above and the wording is in the official text at the address at the bottom of this page. Counted by the same check that refuses to build this page if the text turns up in it.
We will never sign one of these and there is no version of this product that does. The declaration is the manufacturer's own statement, made under the manufacturer's own responsibility. We did not build your machine and we have not assessed it. We can lay the boxes out. Filling them in and signing is yours, and nobody else can do it for you. There is no code path anywhere in this lane that writes a name, a date or a signature into one of these boxes, and that is on purpose rather than an oversight.
The 5 things this page will not tell you
Written down here rather than left for you to find out the hard way. Each one is something we could say that would make this feel more urgent than it is, and each one is something we cannot point at a sentence for.
- “the fine is X”penalties are set by each country, not by the Regulation. Article 50 hands it to the Member States. We have read none of the 27 national rules, so we do not have a number and will not invent one. (Article 50(1))
- “your country needs language Y”each Member State determines the language. Our country-to-language list is the official-language reference data, which is not the same thing as a determination and is marked as reference data everywhere it appears. (Article 10(7))
- “you are non-compliant today”as of 2026-08-24 the Regulation does not apply yet. It applies from 20 January 2027. This product sells getting ready, not a compliance verdict on today. (Article 54)
- “everything already built is now illegal”machines placed on the market before 20 January 2027 in conformity with the old directive can still be made available afterwards. The clock is on PLACING on the market. (Article 52(1))
- “we can sign your declaration”it is the manufacturer's statement under the manufacturer's sole responsibility. There is no version of this product that signs one. (Annex V, Part A, point 4)
We ran our checker over 3 invented manualsrun 2026-08-30 · 3 invented manuals
None of these manuals is real. There is no such machine and no such maker, and neither of them carries a name, an address or an email — not a real one and not an invented one. They are here to show you what the free check says, and the words below are what it said on the day this page was built, not a transcript somebody kept.
| The invented manual | Words | Facts it found | What the checker said |
|---|---|---|---|
| A full manual, going to Germany, France and Poland | 343 | 36 | nothing wrong with it — German, French, Polish needed |
| The same machine, described in a page and a half, same three countries | 29 | 0 | this looks like a page, not a manual - send the whole thing; we found no DANGER / WARNING / CAUTION headings at all, so either the safety section is missing or it is written in a way we cannot spot |
| The full manual again, this time going to Greece and Croatia | 343 | 36 | we can translate into Greek, Croatian but we cannot fact-check those versions, so we will not sell them as checked |
A full manual, going to Germany, France and Poland — 343 words, 17 numbers with units, 2 part numbers, 3 cross references, 4 safety headings and 10 instructions not to do something. Languages needed: German, French, Polish.
The same machine, described in a page and a half, same three countries — 29 words, 0 numbers with units, 0 part numbers, 0 cross references, 0 safety headings and 0 instructions not to do something. Languages needed: German, French, Polish.
The full manual again, this time going to Greece and Croatia — 343 words, 17 numbers with units, 2 part numbers, 3 cross references, 4 safety headings and 10 instructions not to do something. Languages needed: Greek, Croatian. We cannot fact-check Greek, Croatian, so we would not sell those as checked.
Every one of those numbers has to survive into every language version, and a number is compared by what it is worth, never by how it is spelt. German writes four and a half as 4,5 where English writes 4.5, and writes fifteen hundred as 1.500 where English writes 1,500. A checker that compared the spelling would shout at every correct translation and then go quiet on the one where 4.5 had become 45. That is the whole reason this exists.
Nobody has used this
0 manuals have ever been sent to us and 0 have ever been checked. Counted out of the lane's own store as this page was built, not remembered.
There is nowhere on this site to send a manual, and we are not pretending otherwise. The checker is working code and the dates above are the reading it checks against. Neither of those is a service you can use today. When this page can honestly say otherwise, it will say it here.
Where this reading came from
- One dated reading of one published textRegulation (EU) 2023/1230, consolidated version 02023R1230-20230629, including corrigendum C1. Fetched and read on 2026-08-24. Every date and article number on this page comes out of that one reading and no other.
- Read it yourself herehttps://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02023R1230-20230629
- Why the text itself is not on this pageWe have no readable permission to republish it. The container-bill page on this site does print its rule's exact words, because a United States federal regulation carries no copyright of its own by statute. No such statute covers this text, we did not find a permission that says we may, and not finding one is not the same as being told yes. So this page carries dates, article numbers and our own words. 20 quoted sentences from our reading are held against these words on every build; 1 more are shorter than 6 words and are not guarded, because a two-word length of time is not somebody's writing and no page could describe it without using the same two words.
- What “verified” means and does not meanVerified means: the sentence quoted was found in the published text, and the article number next to it is the article it sits under. It does NOT mean a lawyer has advised on it. Where an item is our READING of the text rather than the text itself, it is marked unverified or withdrawn, however obvious the reading looks.
Tell us which countries you ship to
No pay button on this one yet. Email operations@ustechautomations.com. There is nothing to buy on this page and nothing to sign up to. If you build machines and sell them into Europe, tell us the countries, and we will tell you which languages that means and which of them we could check ourselves — before anybody spends anything.
Email us the countries you ship toIf a date or an article number above does not match what you see in the official text, say which line and we will read it again. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong about somebody else's deadline.